Esoteric Update #189 - Break's Over

Ah, here I am, back from my "break" and just in time for a new update. So let's start by talking about how that break went and how I'm feeling. It's not great. I was at the doctor's 6 times during the last 14 days, and I feel absolutely exhausted, though it mostly hit me this Saturday and Sunday, persisting to today. Some of those evenings were hellish, and I remain mostly feeling sad and confused. So essentially a great way to spend my birthday. I think I can get back more or less into the swing of things now. We'll see how it goes.

Ok, so now starting the update proper, have some lore:

Lore: The Lives of Nightmares

And an article:

Autopresentation – Extra – Mitsuru Kirijo

So for the game itself, there's a lot to be said, but I'm not exactly sure how much of it I want to explain in detail. So I think I'll resolve to posting some links to Twitter here and there, as I've been putting my thoughts out there pretty regularly now.

Before that, let's say that I did fix some bugs, made some minor changes to the engine (API), and wrote some small tools to help with development. But overall, I mostly worked on the emotion system and some one-off issues with the inventory system.

For the emotion system, I managed to finally finish the implementation. This consisted of a few loose ends, a lot of them technical, but from a player perspective, the whole system now has a visual representation in the character sheet:

More importantly, from my perspective as the person coding all of this, I now can manipulate emotional values in a semi-automated way, conditions to check in conversations or events, and log the daily changes to the values. I talked about the system in one of those Twitter posts I mentioned.

For the rest, it can be a bit of a mess, but it includes the following changes:

• we added two new styles of shirts,
• conducted experiments with chastity belts,
• developed a testing Kevin (yes, he is indeed stuffed in the fridge),
• did horrible things to the testing Kevin (no, seriously, give it a look; it has to do with autopsies and biometric locks, it's cool),
• began implementation of nighttime sunglasses induced blindness,
• partially automated lock/passcode generation.

It was... quite a few things. The rather painful nature of my state over the last two weeks meant that focusing on a single task was hard. Many of the developments above were brought on by manic episodes caused by taking wholly unreasonable amounts of proscribed drugs, primarily painkillers and muscle relaxants.

With that behind me, for now, I hope, I'm planning to resume more structured development.